Chapter 2 - The Silent Interrogation
The subterranean level of the Moretti mansion had no windows, no mahogany paneling, and no velvet drapes. It was a cold, poured-concrete bunker built beneath the estate's sprawling wine cellar, equipped with acoustic dampening walls, independent power generators, and a dedicated fiber-optic monitoring station.
Marco had already set the dismantled camera onto a stainless steel workbench. Standing beside him was Leo, the family’s elite cybersecurity specialist, whose fingers were flying across a mechanical keyboard as three high-resolution monitors flickered to life.
Victoria sat on a metal folding chair in the center of the room. She had wrapped her silk robe tightly around herself against the damp chill, her pristine posture maintained despite the horror of her situation. Two armed guards stood silently by the heavy iron door.
"Give me the signal chain, Leo," Allesandro commanded, leaning against the edge of the workbench, staring at the microscopic circuit board pulled from Daisy’s head.
"It's sophisticated, Boss," Leo replied, adjusting his glasses. "It wasn't broadcasting to a local receiver inside the house. The device used an ultra-wideband frequency, bouncing off a low-Earth-orbit commercial satellite array. It bypassed our home Wi-Fi entirely. It didn't trigger any of our localized frequency sweeps because it only transmitted in three-second bursts once every hour."
"A store-and-forward bug," Allesandro noted, his eyes narrowing. "It records constantly onto an internal flash memory, compresses the audio and video, and dumps the file to an off-site server during the signal burst."
"Precisely," Leo nodded. "And whoever wrote this firmware was clever. But they made one mistake. The satellite relay required a hardcoded authorization token to route the data packet through the commercial proxy."
"Trace it," Allesandro ordered.
"Already on it. Digging through the encrypted handshakes now." Leo tapped a final key, and a stream of hex code filled the center monitor, resolving into a geographical coordinate and a registered corporate entity.
Leo stopped typing. His face drained of color as he read the output on the screen. He looked up at Allesandro, hesitating.
"Read it aloud, Leo," Allesandro said calmly.
"The IP address resolves to a secure server farm in Jersey City," Leo said quietly. "Registered to Vanguard Logistics LLC. That’s... that’s a primary holding company owned by the FBI’s Organized Crime Task Force. Specifically, the office of Special Agent Richard Vance."
A heavy, suffocating silence descended upon the room.
Victoria let out a shaky breath, throwing her hands up in self-defense. "You see?! It was the Feds! They must have intercepted the package when I ordered it online! They bugged it before it arrived at the mansion! I had nothing to do with this, Allesandro! I am a victim here!"
Allesandro didn't look at her. He kept his eyes glued to the screen. "Vance," he muttered under his breath. Agent Vance had been hunting the Moretti family for a decade, stymied at every turn by clean paperwork and ironclad alibis. "Vance couldn't get a warrant to wiretap this estate. So he put a wiretap on a four-year-old child."
"It's worse than that, Boss," Leo added, his voice barely a whisper. He pointed to a secondary line of code on the diagnostic panel. "Look at the access logs. The data stream wasn't just going to Vance’s server in Jersey. It was being mirrored in real-time to a secondary local MAC address."
"Local?" Marco asked, his hand dropping to his gun. "Meaning inside the city?"
"Meaning inside this house," Leo corrected, turning to look directly at Victoria. "The command to initiate the daily transmission didn't come from the satellite. It came from a smartphone connected to the primary estate guest network at six fifteen every evening. Right when the maid takes the child upstairs for her bath."
Allesandro turned his gaze toward Victoria. The air in the room seemed to drop ten degrees. "You said you bought the doll in Soho, Victoria."
"I... I did!" she stammered, her voice cracking for the first time. Panic flared in her eyes. "I went to the store myself!"
"Leo," Allesandro said, his voice terrifyingly calm. "Check the MAC address of Victoria’s phone against the mirror log."
Leo typed rapidly. A split second later, a red box flashed on the screen: MAC ADDRESS MISMATCH.
"It's not her phone, Boss," Leo reported.
Victoria collapsed back against her chair, clutching her chest, letting out a sob of relief. "I told you! I told you I was innocent!"
"Then whose phone is it?" Allesandro demanded.
Leo hit another key, cross-referencing the MAC address with the router’s historical access tables. A name popped up on the display screen.
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It wasn't Victoria Hail.
It was Elena Bennett—Lily’s mother, the trusted housekeeper who had lived under Allesandro’s roof for five years.
